Pirate Bay Now Mines Cryptocurrency in Your Browser Without Consent

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A few weeks ago, The Pirate Bay was in the news for its test-drive of a new revenue model–cryptocurrency mining in your browser. At the time, the site only implemented the mining on its main page and search results; individual torrent links were not affected. Now, TPB has turned the capability back on, and plans to leave it on for the foreseeable future.

Torrentfreak reports the miner appears to be throttled, so it won’t peg your CPU to 100 percent load. TPB appears to be working with CoinHive, based on the number of requests made to that domain. We decided to see which browsers are and aren’t affected by the mining script, with some interesting results. We can confirm that using an application like uBlock Origin or presumably Adblock Plus will block the script on any browser. Two browsers, Vivaldi and Edge, did nothing unusual when visiting ThePirateBay.org. Firefox, on the other hand, immediately started running a very high CPU load:

CPU usage using Firefox.

Presumably Chrome (sans ad blockers) would do the same thing, since it’s the most popular browser on the market. Also, hilariously, Internet Explorer will promptly start mining cryptocurrency if you fire it up and visit The Pirate Bay.

The script is fairly well-behaved, as these things go. While it is chewing up some CPU time, there are applications that can bog down an entire system while using just 8-15 percent of the CPU. I left the browser window open for several minutes and never heard my case fans spin up or saw a dramatic temperature change. The percentage of CPU usage I’m seeing suggests the script targets 25-35 percent CPU usage. On a six-core/12-thread system, that works out to roughly four threads, rounded up or down to the nearest core.

I also tested how the script would react when I either opened multiple pages in the same browser session or if I visited TPB with two different browsers.

I love you guys so much, I ran Internet Explorer. Briefly.

There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that visiting multiple TPB pages with the same browser session did not create additional system load. If you have The Pirate Bay open in two different Firefox tabs, total CPU usage is the same as using it for one Firefox tab.

The above image confirms there’s a limit to this behavior. If you visit TPB in two different browsers simultaneously, both of them will begin mining cryptocurrency.

Potential Funding Model or Really Bad Idea?

There’s some genuine potential utility in a revenue model that allows site visitors to directly help fund a website by running a revenue-generating application. I don’t work in advertising–those functions are strictly siloed at ExtremeTech–but I am aware of the general revenue trends in the industry, and they’re not good. Google and Facebook now account for a combined 61 percent of all advertising revenue, which leaves the entire rest of the country scrabbling for less than half the market, while facing off against two companies that are so dominant, they effectively set price for everyone else. Digital advertising now dwarfs print advertising in exposure, but print ads are vastly more profitable than anything you see online.

The success of crowdfunding and services like Patreon have demonstrated that grassroots fundraising can absolutely help support a project or person, which means the mining model could theoretically work. But there’s one major problem with the concept: It only works if only a few sites use it.

The Pirate Bay’s 30 percent CPU usage didn’t impact my desktop usage any, but what if I’d had 5-6 different websites open, all of which used this kind of mining? At a certain point, we all run out of CPU cycles to spare. While that can be partly alleviated by running the script at a very low priority, five different websites with five different scripts means Windows 10 is stuck trying to allocate cores and memory to applications that may have conflicting opinions on how those resources should be distributed. The more browser-mining sites you have open, the greater the risk of a problem.

Voluntary distributed computing projects like SETI or Folding@Home have long invited people to donate spare CPU or GPU cycles to various causes, but there’s a big difference between choosing to opt into a program that supports something you care about, and having control over your own hardware unilaterally yanked away. At the very, very least, these programs would need to be opt-out. Opt-in is the better choice, though it would also limit total earnings. There’s also a serious issue of market volatility. If the value of a given cryptocurrency falls 50 percent, a site’s revenue that month is going to drop by nearly the same amount.

Put it all together, and I’m not sure it’s a workable approach. A company might earn a little extra cash along the way, and an opt-in system would ensure that the only people mining would be those that choose to do it. Market volatility and overall system load seem to make the concept practically infeasible, though we’d be curious to see what such a system would look like if these issues could be fixed.